When comparing PharoJS vs Amber, the Slant community recommends Amber for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Amber is ranked 11th while PharoJS is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Amber is:
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Program the web in Smalltalk
For people who enjoy programming in Smalltalk, Pharo allows developers to use Smalltalk for web development as well, since it transpiles Smalltalk code to JavaScript.
Pro Support for Phonegap to go directly to iOS/Android mobile App
Pro Compiles to very efficient Javascript, with almost perfect Smalltalk semantics
Pro Great IDE support
Pro Seamless integration with JavaScript libraries
Can directly call to / be called from JavaScript and can use foreign JavaScript objects.
Will soon have ability to generate and use AMD modules.
Pro Includes an IDE
Amber includes an integrated development environment with a class browser, workspace, transcript, object inspector and debugger.
Pro Smalltalk is a simple, elegant, and powerful language
Pro One-to-one JS equivalent
Amber is written in itself, including the parser and compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent.
Cons
Con Very few learning resources
There are very little learning resources for Amber outside the official documentation. Which may not be enough for beginners, especially people that don't have much experience in programming.